Various embodiments of this disclosure relate to shared caches and, more particularly, to a position-based replacement policy for address synonym management in shared caches.
In a processor, each core may be associated with its own virtual memory, and virtual addresses in the virtual memory translate to physical addresses in the physical memory. Each core thus has access to its own translation lookaside buffer (TLB), which is specialized hardware private to its associated core. The TLB may handle translations back and forth between virtual and physical addresses for its associated core. Because there are multiple virtual address spaces, each physical address may map to multiple virtual addresses. Each set of virtual addresses that correspond to a common physical address is known as a set of synonyms. Various mechanisms exist for managing synonyms in a computer system.